Reading the TA leaves: How technical assistance can improve the odds of successful policy implementation

It has been said that Congress is not one institution but “535 small businesses.” When you add the dozens of congressional committees, there is no one standard operating procedure for legislative work. That’s particularly true when it comes to writing legislation that delivers intended outcomes. Certainly, marshalling the support to get a bill through the committee process with sufficient backing to carry it through final passage and signed into law are baseline metrics for legislative success. But if the purpose of legislation is to get policy implemented successfully, then the political process is just the start. No less important, if much less visible, is writing legislation that actually enables outcomes.

Trying to write legislation that will generate specific outcomes in the way Congress intends is akin to trying to see the future — attempting to predict what challenges will arise, what resources will be needed, and how future events will affect the policy. Through technical assistance, agencies that will be tasked with implementing policy can share feedback on draft legislation before it is passed, giving legislators a better chance of predicting the future effectively. But technical assistance, or TA, varies in quantity, specificity, and scope. Sometimes, interpreting TA to support successful legislative drafting is as useful as reading tea leaves to divine the future.

We set out to develop a map of the technical assistance process for draft legislation to develop a common understanding of the process, highlight best practices for the current system, and suggest ways to make the system more beneficial. To do so, we surveyed current and former federal employees (both legislative and executive branch); interviewed 15 individuals who have been involved in the TA process; and convened a working group with former congressional staffers and former agency congressional liaisons. Our goal was not to produce a comprehensive report on how the TA process works, but rather to start a conversation about how this important element of the “feedback loop” between Congress and the executive branch can support better implementation and legislative outcomes for the public.

The role of technical assistance in successful legislation

What the research shows

A bill that has the best chance of passing does not necessarily have the best chance of getting implemented successfully. Vague language can make it easier to corral the needed votes and other support. Adding mandates and process steps may be easier to measure than outcomes. There is constant pressure to keep the cost minimal (better yet, nonexistent) even when successful implementation requires an investment. Each factor — lowest possible cost, vague, highly directive — often makes it easier to get needed votes, but as our research shows also increases the likelihood that the legislation will struggle in implementation.

The best starting point for writing legislation that will enable its desired outcomes is to first assess the implementation environment: 

• What are the agency’s current priorities and incentives? 
• Who would implement the policy that you’re drafting? How do they view the problem that you’re trying to address? 
• What resources would be needed to execute the policy? 
• What, if anything, is the agency itself already doing to achieve these goals? What are the gaps? Would your solutions interfere or conflict with those efforts? 
• What resources does the agency need to successfully implement the policy? Or what would it need to stop doing or deprioritize to make space for new requirements?

Technical assistance can be an immensely effective process for answering these questions. 

First principles

Technical assistance is the process by which congressional offices and committees send draft legislation to agencies or outside individuals or entities for expert technical feedback. TA provides an opportunity for the legislative and executive branches to collaborate on developing solutions that are likely to have real-world impact. TA helps identify statutory, operational and resource constraints that could complicate or impede implementation.

But the process can also create challenges given the conflicting incentives and political realities that are often at play. In fact, through our work in this space at the Niskanen Center and the Partnership for Public Service, we often hear about challenges in the TA process from both the executive and legislative sides. Every individual we have spoken with describes TA differently, sometimes directly contradicting what others view as basic rules or guidelines for an effective process. It’s clear that the TA process is loosely defined and operates differently from agency to agency depending less on fixed rules and more on relationships, resources and incentives.

One way to think of it is as a broad, main path with numerous formal and informal side trails. In our research, we’ve identified up to eight entities that are often involved in the TA request process. We discuss these in the “Mapping the TA process” section.

Types of feedback shared in the TA process

Based on our interviews, we identified three distinct types of feedback that can be shared as part of the TA process. Sometimes congressional staff explicitly ask for these different types of feedback while other times the different types are baked into an agency response:

• Policy feedback focuses on whether the draft legislation as written will produce the intended outcome. Policy considerations might include:
  • Does the agency interpret the text of the bill the way Congress intends?
  • Is the policy mechanism (e.g., governance, funding, regulations, subsidies, taxes) appropriate for the goal?
  • Does the proposed legislation include the necessary authorities?
• Implementation feedback assesses whether the policy as written can be implemented in reality and whether the agency has the tools, resources and capabilities to do so:
  • Are there any processes, statutory requirements or other roadblocks that will impede the agency in achieving the intended outcome?
  • Is the scope of the policy within the agency’s mission?
  • Does the agency have the resources (e.g. budget, personnel) to do the work? 
• Political feedback considers to what extent the legislation is aligned with agency goals or administration priorities. It’s important to bear in mind that the TA process is not intended to solicit administration support for a proposal. It’s intended to provide legislative staff responsible for drafting the law with a technical assessment of feasibility or practicability rather than a political opinion. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) operates a specific process for whether the administration should take a position on legislation through interagency coordination. That said, if an individual or office in an agency agrees or disagrees with the goal or approach of a piece of legislation, the feedback they share may support that view.

Specificity in a request for technical assistance will influence the relevance of the feedback. If congressional staff send an agency a TA request without specifying the type of feedback they are interested in, the agency’s response, understandably, may not be relevant or on point. The more specific congressional staff are when asking for assistance, the more robust the support they’re likely to get in return.

Agency staff are generally empowered to respond substantively to TA requests but not to give specific redlines — that is, to provide specific edits to the draft legislation — unless there is a clear ask from Congress to do so. Given the importance of collaboration and concern for effective time management, it can be helpful for congressional staff to engage the agency before drafting the legislative text to discuss the policy goals and assess ways to craft a feasible proposal. 

Mapping the TA process

Below is a general map of the main participants and potential paths in the technical assistance process. This is a composite version, given the diversity of the approaches. of the major steps that typically occur. The first page is an overview. You can scroll through each step using the arrows on the carousel below.

Understanding the process and players

Congress initiates requests for technical assistance. This may come directly from a senator’s or representative’s office (a “personal office”) or committee staff. Personal office staff will often request TA ahead of introducing a bill, whereas committee staff often seek input as they consider moving the bill forward in the legislative process (e.g., for markup).

In general, an agency’s main point of contact for TA requests is its office of congressional and legislative affairs (OCLA), although some agencies call this the office of the congressional liaison or office of legislative affairs. In this role, OCLA is charged with processing responses across agency and subagency entities and clearing the response for transmission back to the requesting office in Congress. Alternatively, in some agencies, legislative counsel manages this process. 

After initial review, OCLA sends requests for TA to relevant agency subcomponents, program offices and other policy staff for comment on the technical aspects of the proposal and implementation implications. If offices or individuals share conflicting feedback, OCLA has to facilitate a process to resolve the perspectives and formulate a cohesive agency response. For example, different subcomponents in an agency may feel they each should be tasked with a new responsibility or process, or have different perspectives on the additional resources that the agency will need to be successful. OCLA may facilitate a meeting to resolve these conflicts, or escalate decisions to senior leaders in the agency. 

From there, the request is usually moved to the agency’s office of general counsel for final clearance. Once that’s complete, OCLA will send the TA back to Congress. Due to confidentiality, most agencies will not disclose that they have provided TA to anyone else (e.g., majority or minority staff, or committee staff if the request was from a personal office).

Interagency coordination and OMB

If the legislative proposal is specific to a single agency — for instance, a change in the authorizing statute for the Department of Veterans Affairs — the formal TA process occurs entirely within that agency. In some instances, the agency will forward it for further vetting among the agency’s senior political appointees or for cross-agency coordination. This is where OMB might be engaged given its role as an interagency coordinator and clearance house for legislative proposals that affect multiple agencies. OMB also solicits agency views on pending legislation to inform potential statements of administrative policy or positions on enrolled bills approved by both the House and Senate intended to guide presidential action. OMB Circular A-19 outlines the executive branch’s process for legislative coordination and clearance, and sets an expectation for cross-agency coordination.

During this process, OMB convenes representatives of agencies with opposing views to deconflict those views, which extends the process. The final product represents a negotiated, cross-agency assessment of the legislative proposal, but often adds more time (on the order of weeks) to the formal TA process, and agencies may balk at involving OMB for that reason. 

TA the informal way

While the formal process includes requests routed through agencies’ congressional and legislative affairs offices, the informal TA approach is anchored less in process and more in people and relationships. Congressional staff often focus on relationship building with their counterparts at key agencies. These trusted relationships can lead to informal conversations that can help staff identify gaps and answer quick questions, bypassing some of the challenges of the formal process, albeit foregoing the chance for buy-in and formal relationship building.

Understanding the challenges

Incentives

The steps outlined above are an abridged version of what can be a complex and challenging process that entails reconciling conflicting views, imperatives and goals; navigating the hierarchies across and within agencies and branches of government; and the often urgent need to implement public policy. The TA process is rife with varying stakeholder incentives, resulting in a constant push and pull to both deliver public impact and win or keep political power. Occasionally, these incentives align. More often, they clash, deepening the complexity of the process.

Understanding these incentives is essential for both legislative and executive branch staff involved in the process. The table below outlines major goals of the participants and highlights common concerns:

Political goals and realities often collide in the TA process. Finding the balance among them is immensely challenging with even the simplest of bills, and the welter of competing interests can prevent the TA process from achieving the goal of improving bills, and thus public policy, better. Yet when done well — when the participants are informed, efficient and respectful of one another and of the process itself — technical assistance helps build better relationships between Congress and agencies and improves the prospects for positive, constructive collaborations and successfully implemented public policies.

Staff capacity

Capacity challenges can make the technical assistance process difficult on both the executive and legislative sides.

In the executive branch, TA requests take time to answer, particularly if there are multiple subcomponents or program offices that need to review and comment. In interviews, we heard of time estimates that ranged between three weeks and three months for a general TA process, though interviewees said that requests can be fast-tracked and turned around in a matter of days.

It’s common for an office of congressional and legislative affairs to be managing multiple requests at the same time in addition to responding to inquiries and oversight requests, managing constituent casework inquiries from congressional offices, and countless other tasks. When forwarded to program offices or agency subcomponents, TA requests often require staff to rearrange their workflow. Agencies may only have a limited number of staff with the expertise to answer the TA request, making it even more challenging to deconflict priorities. Add in additional considerations such as the complexity of the bill under review or in development and internal review procedures, and it’s easy to see how the timeline to produce meaningful feedback — and the legislation and implementation that follow — can be lengthy.

Staff in an agency’s OCLA typically manage TA requests and determine timelines for response. Generally, requests from committee staff are prioritized since the request for technical assistance signals a committee’s interest in moving legislation forward, elevating the stakes for all involved.

Given agency workloads, when proposing turnaround timelines for TA requests, congressional staff should balance the value of a swift turnaround versus the value of a more thoughtful, comprehensive response that additional time can produce, which interviewees suggested requires a minimum of three weeks.

Staff-capacity challenges run both ways. The legislative branch has roughly 1/120th the staff of the executive branch, and legislative staff in personal offices have an average tenure of only three years. The high turnover makes it challenging to maintain relationships across the branches and access to knowledge of how things work. Rarely does either side have the capacity to prioritize every TA request.

Solutions: Best practices for the system today

Through our interviews and research, we uncovered best-practice approaches to enable informative and actionable TA for legislative staff who want to write implementable legislation. This checklist includes steps that have worked well in the past, or were suggested by OCLA staff, given the current challenges of the process.

Solutions: Opportunities for reform

When we asked interviewees how they would improve the TA process, two major themes emerged: 1) finding formal ways to delineate different types of feedback; and 2) creating more opportunities to engage and build relationships between agency and congressional staff.

Delineating feedback

Pretending that conflicting incentives and “small p politics” don’t exist or won’t creep into a system is unrealistic. But one clear suggestion from our interviews was the need to clarify whether the feedback relates to implementation details, agency or administration policy positions (political feedback), or policy mechanisms. Being able to distinguish the type of feedback will help congressional staff frame and articulate their TA requests and to evaluate the applicability of the feedback.

Here are two promising solutions from our interviews:

• Use different formats to delineate differences. Request different types of feedback in different formats. For example, one agency uses different colors when providing redline suggestions on bills (e.g., legal feedback in purple, policy feedback in red). Another uses a cover sheet for TA that includes specific fields for feedback: what the agency understood as the goal of the legislation; its feedback based on that understanding; and its rationale for its feedback.
• Go to different stakeholders for different feedback: While agencies may have all three kinds of feedback to provide, interviewees suggested initially seeking feedback from other sources, with a focus on just one type of feedback. For example, a congressional support agency like the Government Accountability Office or Congressional Research Service may be tapped to give implementation-focused feedback if they have the right access and insights into agency processes and resource needs. This approach may require additional capacity or access, and potentially reforms to the organizations. Interviewees also suggested talking with former agency staff about implementation details given that they no longer need to represent the agency’s perspective, or creating a formal process to connect with former staff, such as the Departure Dialogues project, which collected formal “exit interviews” from departing civil servants in 2025. Nonprofits and other organizations that work closely with the federal government can also connect legislative staff with former agency staff.

Creating opportunities to engage and build relationships

Building trust is fundamental, and it was a recurring theme in our interviews. Good TA is a two-way street. When asked about how to foster trust, many interviewees said something along the lines of, “I wish that we could have had a conversation.” It is hard to build trust when last-minute TA requests or emails with information requests are the only time that agency staff and congressional staff interact. Some suggestions for trust and relationship-building include:

• Hold regular, closed-door briefings among congressional and agency staff to discuss agency successes and challenges and how Congress can be a partner in solving problems. This does not have to be in the context of a specific legislative proposal or an oversight hearing. Sometimes, it is more helpful to hear firsthand feedback from within an agency regarding policy that agency staff are implementing or services they are delivering (e.g., legislative staff are writing a bill to improve customer service for those applying for visas based on something a member of Congress has heard from a constituent. The TA request can seek information on what USCIS is working on regarding this topic). 
• Bring in more detailees: When agency staff have the opportunity to join a committee as a detailee, they learn about work in the committee firsthand and can share their expertise and experience outside the confines of the TA process. This often means that they can share background information or context to improve draft legislation, or help determine if a bill is the right way to solve a problem. Interviewees suggested that more detailees would be helpful, as well as the potential for committee staff to serve in agencies, either in the offices of congressional and legislative affairs or even program offices to learn about implementation firsthand. 

Conclusion

The technical assistance process has tremendous potential to close the feedback loop between the executive and legislative branches, but only if the people running it choose to treat it as the collaborative tool it could be rather than a required process formality. The recommendations outlined in this report can help staff to get the most out of the process as it stands, but there is potential for greater reform. While this paper focuses on better navigation as an immediately available tool, better design is the goal ahead.

Thank you to: Alan Alonso, Ben Bain, Eric Bursch, Jenny Mattingley, Georgeann McLemore, Gabe Menchaca, Jason Olin, Rich Pilskin, Isabel Rosa, Gil Ruiz, Corey Schrodt, and our interviewees for their contributions to this article.